5 posts tagged “ubuntu”
Every 6 months Canonical makes a new release of Ubuntu. Each release is codenamed with an adjective and an animal. Both words begin with the same letter of the alphabet and the given letter more or less progresses with each release. It's a great naming scheme.
For example, there was Warty Warthog, Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger, then Dapper Drake. Edgy Eft has been release for 6 months now and Feisty Fawn was released just yesterday.
Names are chosen from suggestions put up by ubuntu wiki members on this page. Late last year I added a few proposals (heres my diff), including the adjective Lampooning and the animals Lagomorph and Gibbon. And recently it was announced that the next release would be codenamed Gutsy Gibbon! I'm stoked, they chose gibbon!
I'm very happy because, in some small way, I've helped out. Now this 5 seconds of fame is over, maybe I 'get some skills' and help the product in a more meaningful way. ;)
If you've ever wondered about Ubuntu (or Linux in general) and thought you might give it a try, the Feisty Fawn release of Ubuntu (due on 19 April) is definitely the right distribution to go with.
With a Windows Migration tool and 3D windowing (apparently one-click to setup) Feisty gives Vista a big run for its money. This is especially true when you consider that its free and doesn't need big end butch systems to run on.
Read more about it in this article at softpedia.com
Seriously, this is just a kid mucking around with Beryl but its a good bit of fun anyway. And its a chance for me to try out the uploading of video to Vox.
Some time ago, last year in fact (how time flies) my friend Marky Jones sold me his second hand iPod for a steal. While I've really enjoyed listening to podcasts and jazz I often found the software interface a little awkward. The need to synchronise music using iTunes was quite annoying all I really wanted was to treat the iPod like a USB disk and manage the music myself. The scenario really came to a head when I moved to Ubuntu as there's no iTunes for Linux.
Instead there are many superior options. At the moment I'm trialling the RockBox firmware for the iPod. I'm almost sold on it. I did the install last weekend and it took about 30 mins, which seems OK to me as I'm a nub at this stuff. My only problem was forgetting to cleanly unmount the iPod before removing it from the USB port. Once I'd corrected that little nugget all was fine.
The RockBox interface is much simplier than the default Apple firmware. To navigate music on the device I use an easily recognisable explorer-like interface. To manage the files on the device I can use a terminal or Nautilus (the file explorer) ... drag/drop, copy/paste it's all very familiar.
Importantly, RockBox will play Ogg Vorbis encoded music files (unlike the default firmware). Ogg is an open encoding format, meaning it can be implemented and improved upon by anybody. This is not the case with mp3, which is closed and requires licensing before an encoder can be published.
However, there are gremlins in the machine. There are no stable iPod releases of RockBox. I am using a nightly build and suffer from intermittent freezes (perhaps 3 or 4 per day). These are sometimes accompanied by a terse error message proclaiming "data abort" and a hex address. Like any good community member, I'm about to hit the RockBox bug tracker and forum to see if this is known about.
Cubuntu - that's my oh-so-clever word-play on the Ubuntu cube. It's something I think (and hope) everyone will be seeing more of in the days to come.
Ubuntu is an operating system for PCs that should at least take a nibble from the Windows marketshare. It's actually a Linux distribution, but don't let that scare you, its based on the premise of ease-of-use. There's a company behind it, offering free shipping and free 3-year support. There's also a very friendly community offering help.
So that's the ubiquitous cube. It's actually a screenshot of my desktop. Several applications are running at once and I'm mid spin between two of my workpanes. A video is playing across the 90° angle of two of the workpanes.
This is the kind of funky 3D rendering being promised by Windows Vista (but being delivered by Xgl today). In fact, I don't think there's anything Vista can do that Ubuntu can't... except perhaps play Warcraft flawlessly. The only reason I keep Windows XP on my dual boot is because I need to play my priest (Seine on Proudmoore) from time to time.
Oh by the way, welcome to my Vox page. I stumbled here via Joi Ito's blog and set up shop. I'm enjoying the WYSIWYG editing and clean layout. Time will tell if the hyper-active advertisement on the side of the page will annoy me enough to leave.
